♀Ann Cochran

Ann Cochran (died 4 October 1789) was the wife of Captain Thomas Wilson of Topsham, in what was then the District of Maine^W, where she died a widow at the age of seventy-six. She was the fifth great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her son William Wilson (1741–1826). A history of Topsham and its neighboring towns published in 1878 credits her with verses mocking the militia leader who had threatened her husband during the Revolution.

Marriage and family

Moses Woodman’s manuscript history of Topsham gives her home as Londonderry, New Hampshire, a town settled in 1719 by Scotch-Irish^W Presbyterians from the north of Ireland. Her husband, by Woodman’s account and that of George and Henry Wheeler’s history of Brunswick, Topsham and Harpswell, published in 1878, had come from Ireland as a boy of about fifteen and landed at Boston. Both histories say that Thomas Wilson married Ann Cochran of Londonderry, New Hampshire; neither gives the date. The two histories credit Thomas and Ann with seven children: William, James, Thomas, Lettice, Margaret, Mary and Elizabeth. William was born in Boston about 1741, by Woodman’s account, and came to Topsham as an infant.

The family’s house at Topsham was a block-house, which the Wheelers place a little west of where her grandson James later lived. They describe a block-house near the same spot, most likely the Wilsons’ own, with a tower in which the women sat spinning while the men worked in the fields, ready to blow a conch shell if Indians were seen approaching.

The tailor’s wife

During the Revolution her husband, Topsham’s tailor, was suspected of being a Tory. The Wheelers tell how, after he voted against resolutions for separation from Great Britain at a Topsham town meeting, Samuel Thompson of Brunswick, who led the militia in Thompson’s War^W, denounced him and gathered men at his house, until steadier townsmen, judging that “a tailor would be too great a loss”, persuaded the rest to withdraw. The same history records that shortly afterwards she wrote satirical verses mocking Thompson, as a man who had sold his oxen and corn to buy a commission and never showed his face at Bunker Hill, and whose men, gathered at the tailor’s house, were made to tremble by his needles and shears. They end:

Some said they were all brave men, Some said that they could fight, sir, But all of them were made to run, And that by the tailor’s wife, sir.

Death

Thomas Wilson died at Topsham on 7 April 1786, in his seventy-third year. Ann died at Topsham on 4 October 1789, aged seventy-six. The church entry of her death calls her “the widow”, and her gravestone names her as the wife of Captain Thomas.

Notes

• The town’s printed vital records give her death from the church record as “Anna, ‘The widow,’ Oct. 4, 1789, a. 76 y.”; the editors identify her from a gravestone of “Ann, w. Capt. Thomas” and from Woodman’s “Ann Cochrane, of Londonderry, N. H.” Her age fits a birth about 1713.
• Woodman’s manuscript Early History of Topsham, kept by the Maine Historical Society, is the source for her origin, her marriage and six of her seven children; the Wheelers most likely drew on the same work, so the two histories are not independent. Mary’s parentage and her birth on 12 March 1752 come from a separate private family record.
• Her parents are not known. Two printed genealogies place her in different Cochran families: Josephine Sandford Ware’s Sandford genealogy (1930) makes her a daughter of Andrew Cochran and Mary Rowan; Dean Crawford Smith’s Ancestry of Emily Jane Angell (1992), offering it only as a suggestion, makes her a daughter of James Cochran and Letitia Patten, born at Londonderry in Ireland about 1713. Neither cites a record, and the published histories of Londonderry and Windham name no Ann Cochran who married a Wilson.
• The Wheelers name the author of the verses only as “Mr. Wilson’s wife”, and print them from the diary of Dr. James McKeen. The Mr. Thomas Wilson of their Revolution stories is most likely Captain Thomas, and Ann, who died as his widow, is the only wife of his on record.